The Breath of the Sun Read online

  “No,” I said. “You’re right. There’s no reason.”

  “Unless you want to bury her,” said Disaine.

  “Are you trying to convince me to stay or go?”

  “I want you to do what will bring you the most peace.”

  I sighed and looked again at the sunbleached, sunwrecked body on the little snag in the cliff.

  “It’s as you said,” said Disaine, “back in the village. She’s coming home — slowly.”

  “That was easier to say back there. Well, fuck.”

  The cliff was naked granite and slick, so Disaine and I went up the ridge and then, as the clouds around us began to darken for the night, built an ice bollard and slipped a rope around it. I rappelled down easily to the place where she lay and before I properly understood what I was doing, my feet were planted in snow and she was there before me, as dead as dead can be — very, very dead. I don’t mean to be cute about it, it’s just that I realized, standing there, that there was less horror in it than I’d expected. All the water in Saon’s rich body was stagnant now, or evaporated. I can’t say it was easy to kick her off the cliff, especially since she rolled briefly faceup and my eyes met raw sockets and I was the only thing above a million feet of dead snow and fog, but I managed it, and then we burnt her.

  “That we might perfume the body of God,” I said, as the damp bones went up. “That we might no longer profane the body of God. That we might cover the body of God with ash like snow; that we might mingle our bodies with the body of God. That this ash will lift and leave the body of God inviolate. It’s something like that.”

  “You were doing fine,” said Disaine, gently, behind me. “May I read a little something?”

  I looked at her — I had been paying attention for a long while only to the bright streaks of flame, the cloud joining cloud, the glowing bone — and saw that she had put her robe on over her pressure suit, and was holding a small book in her three-fingered hand. I said, “Go ahead.”

  She had this place in the book marked with a piece of pink leather. It flapped in her hand as she read, like a gay springtime ribbon.

  “You who would climb the mountain, beware! The heavens are a stark place, without life. The stars need it not, and between them there is not a breath of air, nor spark of fire, nor movement of animals. What is there, then, if not life? What is there is knowledge. It is a place where the only law is the law of mathematics: the transmutation of chemicals and the bleed of sunlight and the most holy ether in which we are supported. Our lives are of the same material as the ether and the stars. It matters not whether you burn flesh or bury it, whether you let it go to carrion or embalm it in a tomb, whether you climb the mountain or walk a thousand miles over flat ground. You cannot escape the fact.”

  “Is that from the Arit Gospel?”

  “Yes,” said Disaine, and carelessly tossed it onto the fire.

  We stayed the night close to the pyre, not wanting to climb in the dark and not wanting to leave the fire unattended, for all that it was a damp dark icy night and the fire surrounded by snow. When we woke up there were still bones in it, but they had entirely ceased to resemble Saon, even though her large front teeth were bared by the flames and looked the same as they had when she had sat in the firelight and laughed, the inside of her mouth hot and snail-wet. The teeth were nothing without the lips. I took a vial of her ashes, and we climbed on.

  In the faith of the Holoh, observance and blasphemy are closely tied. We blaspheme by living here. We were never supposed to live here, but were driven here, by empires and men, to the last land they didn’t want. And so, having already committed our worst sin, we are open to argument. I like that about our faith. It is a living faith, unlike that of Asam, and it can be edited to accommodate changes, complaints, private sorrows, without splintering or breaking open. It also has room for all kinds of corruption and self-interest. I think it gets away with it because, in the end, the Holoh faith is small. It could fit inside one person, if it needed to, and sometimes it feels like it may yet. And so it has the quirks and shames and delights and hypocrisies of that single person.

  So: four young people want to climb the mountain. They have all sorts of different reasons, private and explicit, capable and incapable of being understood. Daila is in love with Saon, he’s in love with me, he’s in love with the idea of himself as the bold leader of his women, kissing messily one and the other, and he is in love with the mountain, too. This is not absurd. His faith is innocent, and it’s weak too. He doesn’t fear God’s offense because he has always known that all his love is returned.

  He is not the only one who thinks he is specially protected, specially adored. His parents feel the same about him, Saon, even me. I don’t like Daila; I always feel that he is coated in glass, and his parents got me for him because I was cheap. They were proud of their ability to see beauty anywhere. But even I can feel the anointing oil, when I run my fingers through his hair.

  Now, Saon, she is smarter than people realize, too. And far more devout. People suppose she is going on with it because she’s dumb-in-love with Daila, but really she thrills to adventure more than he ever will. She is not afraid of God either; she wants to seduce Them, to let Them have Their way with her, but she does it intellectually and with a will. She does not plan to die.

  Which leaves us with Courer and me, sheltering safe in the dazzle of the village’s golden couple. Holoh marriages are essentially business arrangements. The swap is for money, employees, heirs. If you believe in romantic love, if you really want to take out those slick cards with their bright printing and deal them out to each other, you can seek it with your wife — or elsewhere. If it’s elsewhere, people will feel bad for your wife, dimmed next to another’s glow, but it’ll be her fault for being dim in the first place.

  I was used to disappearing, and that was what drew me to the mountain. The purity it offered me, the erasure into a scrape of white. As for Courer, she was already gone. The daughter of an excommunicate Holoh, she was outside the faith, invisible to the mountain. Her steps did not really touch God, in a way that They knew how to feel. That was part of why she had the courage to propose the climb.

  We gathered our supplies in secret, and we left without telling anyone. As we walked up from the village in the smooth predawn light, the secret ran like a line between our four bodies.

  We needed that secret, because ruined though everything else between us was, our climbing together was the best thing in any of our lives. We lived through each other on the mountain; we needed no rope, no word of warning. A belay was only a formality. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know that four people who struggled and kicked against each other whenever they actually spoke should not find a deep redemption, one that fuzzes out the brain like the noise of a great drum, in each other’s company as climbers. But believe me, we had come to need it. Our problem was each other and the solution was each other. And so we left, without telling anyone, because we knew it would delay the shadow of excommunication from passing over us. For a time people would think we had run away. Only when the weather broke would they begin to suspect the truth.

  Excommunication. The word has a ring to it, a brassy complete sound. Etymologically, it’s a combination of other words — stray words of different nations. There is Parnossian commu, to combine, from which we get compact (to agree, or to compress). And there is ex-, that little handle of a particle, used by still more ancient people to connote absence, or a crossing out of the word ahead. To be excommunicate is to be uncombined, to be pulled apart, to be dismembered or flayed, to be outside of the agreement, outside of the law. When Southerners use the word, that’s what they mean: outside the law’s protection, because you are a prisoner or criminal. This does not help the mood of excommunicate Holoh, who were raised to use it more casually. More clinically. It is a cruel state, but it is not described by a cruel word.

  We dropped from the tree like fruit, in the matter-of-fact way of the cold sour apples that come down
in your courtyard. First Daila, for being the leader, and for what he did to Courer. Then Saon and Courer, posthumously, bundled like twins. People thought that their bodies were still hurting the mountain, as a tumor does, lodged in the soft snow of the brain. Dead cells, but still displacing something important. Yes, Courer was born excommunicate, but they thought it might not have taken; they did it again, to be safe.

  Well, something was bringing it on. The mountain was running hot that year, and the snow melted with dangerous abandon, creating layers of slippage beneath every foot. People had hoped to avoid it — had hoped that we would turn back, not damage the mountain as we hoped to, or that Daila would somehow charm it, as he charmed everyone else. There was an idea that his long feet would touch the ground without bleeding it. But no, the snow melted under them.

  The excommunications of Saon and Courer were enough, though. The snow retreated, and that summer was hot and fine — fine as hair drawn over the edge of the eye. I would have been next, but it was generally decided that I didn’t need to be. Besides, they all thought I was too weak, too silly, to really trouble the mountain. I had never impressed when I was Daila’s wife, and now that I was legally his widow, I stood to cause even less damage. So they were happy to let things stay where they were, and take the tourist money my book brought in. I was always smart enough to be generous with that.

  The terrain now was more difficult. Disaine and I walked along ridges that broke and were lost, necessitating sharp little sideways jags across living ice and rock. We traced up the mountain like spiders or ghosts, leaving behind filaments of hemp and starry stabs of screws in the ice. Finally, we broke again, laterally, onto a neat slope of snow like a sledding-hill, hemmed in on either side by ribs of rock, and on one of these ribs we made our camp. You need to stay out of the troughs, on the mountain — the places where avalanches fester. They’re like the dry bottoms of dammed rivers, when the dam could break at any time.

  We were all the while getting higher, of course, driving forwards into the absence of air. We could still take off our helmets to eat, but we felt the outward rush of pressure like an emptiness, a bleed, in the cavities of the face. Soon we would not be able to take them off at all, except inside the pressure-tent, an untried design that sat waiting and coiled in the bottom of my pack. For now, we sat in the thin violet air, poking at a campfire which was likewise thin, pale orange, the opposite color from the air but the same saturation.

  It is thrilling, to be so far up. The very quality of the air is different; it conducts less of the sound of your voice, and its shallowness, its thinness, infects you. It is a small spike in your cold throat. In that narrow air, looking down over the misty land in the last few minutes of sunlight, you hear your own heart like a slow bass drum, and feel the anticipation of a good song beginning, somewhere in your bones, the percussion of the joints and the slur of the blood. Every night feels like a wedding night, and every morning feels like a wedding morning: full of anxiety, without ever enough time to do what you have to do.

  “I already see our mistakes,” said Disaine as the fire spread up the long stick I’d just thrown into it. The kindling for this and Saon’s bier had come from the supply balloons. Those balloons spat out so many luxuries that we would make stupid decisions just to spend them. We ought to have only used the stove, which burnt compact rods of charcoal-like stuff and could be used safely in the tent so long as the fuel held.

  “Yeah?”

  “Suits need work,” she said. “Need a way to eat in them. Need better toilet stuff.”

  I agreed — the toilet situation in the first-generation suits was not to be spoken of. Let’s just say the facilities were both too simple and too complicated.

  “I thought they’d be better,” she said meditatively. “But the wear really kills them, and wearing them for an hour isn’t like living in them for a week.”

  “Maybe we should’ve used a bigger group.”

  “Do you really want that?”

  “Of course not. I hate people.”

  “More people is more people to get hurt. And more people is more to carry. It doesn’t really help unless you’re hiring some of ’em to carry bigger loads while you get the glory, and that’s not how I want to get glory.”

  “Well, you want to do it by yourself and keep the credit. Not risk it being divvied up later, when people catch up with themselves.”

  “You understand me too well, Lamat. I’ll throw you off the mountain before I get home.”

  “Mhm.”

  “Surely you don’t hate all people.”

  “On a good day I hate most of them.”

  “That’s not good for you,” she said earnestly. “You can’t afford contempt for people; you need them too much. And you work in a bar.”

  “I’ve been through some shit,” I said, “and most people, that I know anyway, didn’t lift a finger to help me. Every scrap of help I’ve ever had, I’ve had to give myself.”

  “Well, what about Courer?”

  “Good God, what about Courer?”

  “I imagine she helped you a little.”

  “She would listen to me talk,” I said. And then I thought of Courer after I lost the baby, how I woke up the next day safe and clean and rolled up in a blanket — I’ll tell you about that in good time, right now this is a tale of adventure — and I said, “It was rhetorical, I guess — I have had some help.”

  I was flushed, such that even in this wintry night, beads of sweat were standing like tears on my face. I had never meant to sound so self-pitying.

  “I just don’t want you to hate everybody,” she said again, with that same freshness, the real surprise in her voice that anyone could hate anyone. Disaine’s hatred took form, became violence, burned for the rest of the day, and then hissed out into the sea of her self-regard.

  The weather now was continuously cloudy, gray foam around our heads and hands. We were passing over glaciers, which as I have said were Disaine’s forte; we were roped together, passing slowly over the shallow thumping snow, spring-loaded poles before us to check the path ahead for crevasses. To watch Disaine in her brown-lit helmet was a joy — with her stern leathery face, tongue probing her cheek as she probed the ice, she was the picture of the scientist at work. It was a face that would have looked in the same scowling way at a tube of fluid or a recalcitrant star, at a book of formulae or a strip of cloud.

  Today’s glacier was crowned at both sides by a wild stitching of gray rock, but the ice itself was firm and smooth, not yet summer-rotted, and as our crampons bit the snow they left behind tiny wounds of fresh blue. Ahead and to the side ran the great ripple in the mountain that offers the best and only path on the southern face to the higher reaches, where the sun is blinding and the storms are sharp, and everything is exaggerated a little.

  I saw the suits’ flaws, but I had fallen in love with them anyway. Their leather had stretched and softened with use, and I now felt frustrated only by the continuing ache in my shoulders, used to carrying a pack but not to supporting a mass of heavy glass like the dome of a building. Towards the top of the glacier, we saw the subdued red, faded to a fiery pink by sun and smoked glass and fog, of our next supply cache.

  “Found one,” called Disaine, and we crabwalked to the side, two quiet brown animals poking at the snow, until it was safe to pass.

  It was not the supply cache.

  The most honest way to describe that moment is typographically, like this:

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  A quick drop to a lower state. A whole series of ineffective breaths. Painless, absent, outside of things, excommunicate. I gave a little sound, to no one in particular. Because the tent was still there, where Courer had died.

  I had assumed it would be gone. I had assumed that, like Saon’s body, it had long since been broken by the storms and sent down the mountain, th
e wind ruffling lightly, silently, at its edges. But no: it was just where I had left it when I was young.

  (And, oh, the strangeness of that: I have grown used now to reckoning time the way you do, here in the South. Time as distance from when we are young. It’s no wonder we don’t see it that way on the mountain. The mountain preserves everything: flesh, leather, horror, fear. It preserves the rotten ice until it is ready to sink down and smother us. It preserves the shreds of my past, and it does still, though they are better hidden now. So of course we think of time as something that circles, rather than something added up.)

  The tent lay in the mouth of a narrow cave in the midst of incoherent rock, a cave from which the way up turned steep and stony, raw tumbled stone almost as far as one could see, with only a kiss of snow at the very top to promise better climbing. By now we were wheezing even in the suits, and I thought in the shattered way of oxygen deprivation that maybe they weren’t as effective as they could be, well — so disappointing, but another try, another attempt, Disaine’s money seemed limitless, and the air was still so much sweeter within than without...

  Finding Saon’s body had hardened me to the possibility of Courer’s. There was, after all, not so much left of them to provoke horror; they were just bodies,8 their shapes familiar to me even as their size was altered. Too, I felt a greater kinship with these poor rags than I might have back at the village, when my body was astonishingly pulpy and full of life. Your flesh melts away on the mountain. I had already lost so much of myself in the few weeks of that climb that my leather suit could not mold tightly to me, even relaced and resewn by Disaine’s careful fingers, and my bones burnt in my body. So there we were, fifty feet below the tent, and just as I was recognizing that the little red peak was not the sinuous blow of balloon silk against a crag, the blizzard began.